BE ING KIKUYU IN MERU : CHALLENGING THETR IBAL GEOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL KENYA*

BY TIMOTHY PARSONS

Washington University

ABSTRACT: Faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conqueredKenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageableadministrative units. In linking physical space to ethnic identity, the Kenyan re-serve system assumed that each of these ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. Yet thereserves in the central Kenyan highlands soon became overcrowded and sociallyrestive because they could not accommodate population growth and private claimsto land for commercial agriculture. Although colonial officials proclaimed them-selves the guardians of backward tribal peoples, they tried to address this problemby creating mechanisms whereby surplus populations would be ‘adopted’ intotribes living in less crowded reserves. This article provides new insights into thenature of identity in colonial Kenya by telling the stories of two types of Kikuyumigrants who settled in the Meru Reserve. The first much larger group did solegally by agreeing to become Meru. The second openly challenged the colonialstate and their Meru hosts by defiantly proclaiming themselves to be Kikuyu.These diverse ways of being Kikuyu in the Meru Reserve fit neither strict pri-mordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. The peoplesof colonial Kenya had options in deciding how to identify themselves and couldassume different political and social roles by invoking one or more of them at a timeand in specific circumstances.

KEY WORDS: Kenya, colonial administration, ethnicity.

TEMPERS ran high at Meru local native council (LNC) meetings in early. The councilors were considering assertions by their counterparts in thedensely populated Kiambu District that the Meru should allow landlessKikuyu to settle amongst them on the grounds that all of the agrariancommunities of the Kenyan highlands were members of the same ‘tribe’.These were tense times. The would-be migrants had been turned off settlerfarms and out of the over-crowded Kikuyu heartland. Having reserved themost fertile regions of the highlands for European settlers, the Kenyangovernment struggled to find room for an expanding, highly entrepreneurial,Kikuyu population that had outgrown its ‘native reserves’. Although colonialadministrators had little idea that within three years their tribally-basedconstrictive land policies would provoke the ‘Mau Mau Emergency’, a revoltby landless young Kikuyu, they recognized that the security of British ruledepended on finding space for the tens of thousands of desperate Kikuyu who

* I am grateful to Richard Waller and the members of the International and AreaStudies Migration and Identity Worskhop at Washington University for their commentson this article. Author’s email: tparsons@wustl.edu

Journal of African History, (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press doi:./S

did not fit within the imperial geography of Kenya. Consequently, districtofficers were ready to encourage Kikuyu settlement in less crowded reserveseven though the Kiambu district commissioner acknowledged that othercommunities feared that people from his district were ‘trying to set upKikuyu colonies on their land’.

TheMeru LNC recoiled at the Kiambu councilors’ assertion that theMeruwere really just Kikuyu who had been cut off from the Kikuyu heartland.Stressing their cultural distinctiveness, the council complained that Kikuyuinterlopers seized high quality land and rejected the authority of Merutribunals. Yet the councilors also carefully divided the migrants into twodistinct categories. Reverend Cornelio M’Mukira explained that the Meruhad a longstanding practice of accepting any outsider willing to be adoptedinto a Meru clan as ‘muchiarwa’. In his eyes, the problem was the Kikuyu‘murombi’ who farmed a piece of land on a limited basis. The former term wasmost likely derived from guchiarwa, meaning ‘to be born’, which referredto the fictive blood relationships that developed between Meru families andclans. A murombi, conversely, was a stranger and a beggar. These assimilativepractices were not unique, and the Kikuyu themselves also acceptedoutsiders into their mbari (lineages) as aciarua. Detailed evidence about theadoption process is scant, but it appears that the Meru absorbed significantnumbers, probably totaling in the thousands, of Kikuyu and other out-siders as guchiarwa during the colonial era. Indeed, the Meru districtcommissioner noted that there were plenty of people from other tribes in hisdistrict, some from as far away as Tanganyika, who had become ‘perfectlygood Meru’.

Assimilation into a new community entailed a loss of wealth and status, butit appears that many landless Kikuyu accepted this burden as the price ofgaining access to land. One could move from one ‘tribe’ to another if theadoptee and prospective hosts were sufficiently willing. This was possiblebecause there were indeed significant cultural and linguistic continuitiesamong the various agrarian communities of the highlands. These includedpatrilineal reckoning of descent, patrilocal marriage practices, and theorganization of society around age sets. While shifting or redefining ethnicidentity is never easy, the tense exchanges between the Kiambu and MeruLNCs were born of a much larger controversy in British-ruled Kenya thatlinked identity with physical space, land tenure, economic accumulation, andsocial status.

R E TH I NK I NG TR I B A L I SM AND I D ENT I T Y

Ethnicity is a seductively useful frame, which groups people into coherentand bounded categories based on a shared set of characteristics. East African

Kenya National Archives (KNA) Nairobi, PC CP ///a, Kiambu local nativecouncil (LNC) minutes, Nov. .

KNA PC CP ///, District Commissioner (DC) Meru to ProvincialCommissioner (PC) Central Province (CP), Dec. ; KNA OPE ///, DCMeru to PC CP, Apr. . I am grateful to Patrick Thimangu for the translations andsuggested etymology of the Meru terms.

H. E. Lambert, Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions (London, ), –.

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colonial governments in particular sought to shift conquered populations,whose statelessness seemed chaotic and confusing, into understandable andmanageable administrative units. Conveniently, they assumed that tribeswere less advanced than nations, and thus the British version of the newimperialism was moral and defensible because primitive tribesmen could notgovern themselves. By official imperial thinking, these ‘tribes’ had a commonlanguage, uniform social institutions, and rigid customary laws based on theperception of kinship. In practice, colonial categories of identity were largelyinnovative and imprecise. Their artificiality and ‘weakness’ led John Iliffe tomake the now famous observation that ‘the British wrongly believed thatTanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to functionwithin the colonial framework.’ Iliffe’s epigrammatic summary helpedlaunch a historiographical reconsideration of ethnicity that treated colonial-era ethnic identities as the recent, if not explicitly invented, products ofhuman agency, and that, over time, argued for the importance of Africaninfluence as well as colonial imagination. The older men who successfullyclaimed the status of chiefs, thereby earning the right to speak for their tribes,and the patriots who embraced tribal identities to assert control over womenand younger men were equally invested in promoting these collectivistidentities.

These constructivist and instrumentalist perspectives help to explain whyand how contemporary Kenyan supra-tribes like the Mijikenda, Kalenjin,and Luhya emerged in the twentieth century. Moreover, this scholarshipusefully punctures colonial-era stereotypes of ahistorical African tribalism.It risks, however, overstating the capacity of both African culturalbrokers and imperial administrators to entirely create new ethnic identities.Thomas Spear argues persuasively that instrumentalist and constructivistanalyses miss key continuities between the pre-conquest and colonial erasand cannot explain either the power or the content of contemporarytribalism.

The case of the Kikuyu migrants in Meru brings some clarity to this debateby paying greater attention to how individuals defined themselves in relationto their position in the tribal geography of colonial Kenya, for individualperspectives and ambitions are often lost in the theoretical literature onethnicity in colonial Africa. This study therefore moves beyond literateculture brokers whose accessible and legible output may too easily dominateanalysis by focusing on the decisions of ordinary people not simply in a worldof affect and cultural continuity, but in immediate concerns over their own

J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (New York, ), . A.W. Southall, ‘The illusion of tribe’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, :–

(), ; L. Vail, ‘Introduction: ethnicity in Southern African history’, in L. Vail (ed.),The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, ), .

J. Lonsdale, ‘Writing competitive patriotism in Eastern Africa’, in D. Peterson andG. Macola (eds.), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa(Athens, OH, ), .

J. Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxord, );G. Lynch, I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya (Chicago, ).

T. Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’,Journal of African History, : (), .

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personal status and their strategies for accumulation. Studying these debatesover people who crossed ethnic boundaries offers a way to understandsomething of the dynamics of choice and constraint which shaped ethnicidentity at an individual level.The migrants whomilitantly insisted on declaring themselves to be Kikuyu

demonstrated that colonial tribal identities could express an entrepreneurialindividualism that was defiantly at odds with state-sponsored tribalcollectivism. The individualistic commercial farmers who rejected adoptioninto the Meru tribe did so on the grounds that they were Kikuyu, but theirinterpretation of what it meant to be Kikuyu was sufficiently adaptive andinnovative to accommodate new economic practices and social norms even asit invoked pre-conquest traditions to assert their difference and individuality.Far from being an anachronistic vestige of a pre-conquest tribal age, militantKikuyuness in a foreign native reserve meant that a person refused to allowthe imperial regime to define them as a tribesman with no individual rightsto political representation or economic advancement. Being Kikuyu assertedan aspiration to own land, produce for the market, and define oneself as afully formed person on par with European settlers. This conception of beingKikuyu, which had its roots in nineteenth-century traditions of pioneeringagriculture, allowed for a much greater degree of individualism than the tribalcollectiveness and moral ethnicity of the native reserve system couldaccommodate. Conversely, the hundreds, if not thousands, of migrantswho agreed to become Meru were willing to renounce their Kikuyuness (atleast overtly) because they saw adoption as a means of gaining personalsecurity and access to land. Being Kikuyu meant different things to differentindividuals, depending on their circumstances and position in colonialsociety.

Equally important, the colonial government’s perception of what it meantto be Meru or Kikuyu evolved over time. It was largely impossible to turnstate-sponsored tribal ethnographies and romantic essentialised notions oftribal culture into viable administrative policies. Consequently, the verycolonial officials who spoke passionately about their obligation to protectfragile tribal cultures developed policies that promoted a far more flexible andpragmatic notion of colonial tribalism. By the time of the showdown betweenthe Meru and Kiambu LNCs in the late s, the Kenya governmentwas urging Meru elders to accept anyone willing to bow to their authority asMeru. While the imperial regime’s native reserve system dictated thatquestions of belonging and identity had to be phrased in tribal terms, thedisruptive individuals who insisted on remaining Kikuyu in Meru

J. Lonsdale, ‘Moral and political argument in Kenya’, in B. Berman, D. Eyoh, andW. Kymlicka (eds.), Ethnicity & Democracy in Africa (Oxford, ), .

F. Anthias, ‘Where do I belong?: narrating collective identity and translocationalpositionality’, Ethnicities, : (), –.

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demonstrated that ordinary people had the capacity to undermine this tribalgeography.

T H E NAT I V E R E S E RV E S I N TH E ORY AND P R ACT I C E

Linking physical space to ethnic identity, the reserve system made noallowance for individuality. Under colonial law, reserve land was collectivetribal property and could not be owned or developed by individuals orsold to outsiders. More pragmatically, the reserves were manageableadministrative units and served as reservoirs of cheap labor for Europeanemployers: they fulfilled the humanitarian promise of Frederick Lugard’sdual mandate, promoting economic development and safeguarding ‘nativeinterests’.

In practice, the reserves were never as rational or coherent as they appearedin London or Nairobi. This was particularly true in the central highlandswhere the ‘Kikuyu Land Unit’ was the official settlement area for the Kikuyuand the culturally-related ‘Kikuyu sub-tribes’. Covering roughly ,square miles and divided into separate tribal enclaves that roughlycorresponded to the administrative districts in Central Province, it hadan approximate population of · million people in . The Fort Hall(Murang’a) and Nyeri Kikuyu reserves were overcrowded, but it was in theKiambu reserve, where the Kikuyu population density was people persquare mile in , that the irrationality of the reserve system came intosharp focus. Here the explosive combination of European land expropri-ation, privatization of reserve land for commercial agriculture, and rapidpopulation growth raised tensions and led kinsmen to turn on each other forthe same piece of land. Consequently, Kiambu hemorrhaged peoplethroughout the colonial era.The Embu and Meru reserves, which occupied the western most portion

of the Kikuyu Land Unit, were much emptier and far less tense. While thearid and tsetse fly-ridden western lowlands of Embu and Meru districtswere barely usable, in the s and s there was still unclaimed land inthe optimal eastern zone that fell between , and , feet above sealevel (Fig. ). Furthermore, the higher forested parts of the Meru reservebeckoned to enterprising farmers willing to defy forestry laws by clearingthem.

Although the native reserves appeared as clearly demarcated spaces onofficial maps, they never were coherent tribal homelands, because theirBritish designers could not standardize or simplify the complex mosaic ofhighland identities. In the pre-conquest era, highland peoples often assumednew identities through migration, commerce, enslavement, intermarriage,

F. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (th edn. London, ),–.

W.M. Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories, Part I(London, ), , ; Lambert, Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions, –.

F. E. Bernard, East of Mount Kenya: Meru Agriculture in Transition (Munich,), .

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and adoption. The Kenya government recognized five closely relatedsubgroups (Igoji, Miutini, Imenti, Tigania, and Igembe) plus four slightlymore distinct communities (Muthambi, Mwimbi, Chuka, and Tharaka) as‘Meru’, but even these subcategories were largely abstractions (Fig. ). In thenineteenth century, the ridge top was the most significant factor in shapingcollective identity in what became the Meru reserve. The neighboring

Fig. . Lambert’s ‘Sketch Map of the Kikuyu Land Unit’.

H. E. Lambert, ‘The systems of land tenure in the Kikuyu land unit: part I, historyof the occupation of the land’, Communications from the School of African Studies (CapeTown, ), reprinted , front matter.

T. Spear, ‘Introduction’, in T. Spear and R. Walker (eds.), Being Maasai (London,), –.

J. Fadiman, When We Began, There Were Witchmen: An Oral History from MountKenya (Berkeley, CA, ), , –, –.

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Embu reserve was equally diverse. Under British rule, it included a variety ofpeoples who identified themselves as Mbeere, Chuka, Gichugu, and Ndia(colonial authorities often counted the latter two groups as Kikuyu) inaddition to the Embu themselves. Similarly, the imperial-era Kikuyu beganas a diverse collection of pioneer immigrants who most likely started to clearthe highland forests for farming in the late seventeenth century. In this sense‘Kikuyu’ was more an expression of agricultural expertise than a coherent orbounded ethnic group. These diverse agricultural communities also sharedoral traditions that their ancestors migrated into the highlands several, if notmany, centuries earlier.

Fig. . The colonial geography of the Meru ‘Sub-Tribes’.

H. E. Lambert, ‘The use of indigenous authorities in tribal administration: studies ofthe Meru in Kenya colony’, Communications from the School of African Studies, new seriesno. (April ), .

D. Peterson,CreativeWriting: Translation, Bookkeeping, and theWork of Imaginationin Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth NH, ), –; G. Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu,– (Nairobi, ), ; Fadiman, When We Began, .

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Most district officers were aware of these realities. The pioneer admini-strator Granville St. John Orde-Browne acknowledged the inherent ambi-guity of the native reserve system when he characterized the region betweenthe Meru and Embu heartlands as a ‘debatable’ space ‘inhabited by a group ofsmall tribes possessing many of the characteristics of their neighbors, but alsoretaining numerous local peculiarities’. In Nairobi, however, the colonialgovernment held fast to the notion that Africans lived in precisely boundedtribal societies because tribal stereotypes served specific political andadministrative purposes. Under the Village Headman Ordinance, theregime’s African allies were simply ‘executive agents of the administration’,but tribal romanticism turned them into usefully autocratic chiefs.

It did not matter that highland peoples did not have chiefs in pre-conquesttimes, for the Kenya administration gave colonial identities meaning bymaking the tribe the basic unit of government, education, labor, law, andmost importantly land tenure. At some point, modernizing British rule wouldtransform tribesmen into individuals, but in the near term the Kenyagovernment held that tribal land was community property and could notbe sold or transferred to individuals, African or otherwise. Indeed, the KenyaSupreme Court dismissed Kikuyu land claims by ruling that all ‘landsoccupied by the native tribes of the Protectorate’ was Crown Land, whichmeant that individual tribesmen only had rights to the land they were activelyfarming.

This ‘trusteeship’ was a fig leaf obscuring the real purpose of the reservesystem, which was protecting the exclusive land claims of the Kenyan settlercommunity. Through a series of laws and ordinances the Kenya governmentappropriated territory for European settlement and commercial developmenton the dubious legal grounds that specific tracts of land were either unclaimedor that Africans did not make sufficiently productive use of them. By ,roughly , settlers controlled some , square miles of the highlandson year leases, but they actually only had about to per cent of it inproduction. Speculators held most of the rest.The Crown Lands Ordinanceof contained a provision for setting aside reserves for the exclusive use ofparticular tribes, but in defining where Africans could reside the legislation’sreal purpose was to mark out the spaces where they could not.The legislation did not explicitly grant Africans formal title to the reserves,

and the authorities dragged their heels in demarcating their actualboundaries. This was largely because senior officials agreed with the settlers’assertion that African lands should not be closed off to future economicdevelopment, and it took pressure from missionaries and the metropolitanhumanitarian lobby to force the government to enact the Native Lands Trust

G. St. J. Orde-Browne, The Vanishing Tribes of Kenya, A Description of the Manners& Customs of the Primitive & Interesting Tribes Dwelling on the Vast Southern Slopes ofMount Kenya, & their Fast Disappearing Native Methods of Life (Westport, ), .

Hailey, Native Administration, . Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, The Kikuyu Lands (Nairobi, ), ; K. Maini,

Land Law in East Africa (Nairobi, ), –. B. Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination

(Nairobi, ), ; S. S. S. Kenyanchui, ‘European Settler Agriculture’, inW. R. Ochieng’ and R.M. Maxon (eds.), An Economic History of Kenya (Nairobi, ),–.

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Ordinance, which established that the reserves were ‘for the benefit of thenatives tribes for ever’.

Yet these reserves could not accommodate a growing Kikuyu population.Home to over , people in the early s, the three Kikuyu reserveshad a population density of people per square mile and were neversufficient to contain a community that was increasing by · per centannually. Speaking of only Nyeri and Fort Hall, the agricultural officerColinMaher observed: ‘one may stand and see more than a thousand acres at astretch with scarcely an acre uncultivated’. The situation was even tenser inKiambu where British conquest blocked Kikuyu farmers from opening upnew lands and where the government seized existing farms for missionstations and white settlement. Moreover, its proximity to Nairobi andEuropean settled areas accelerated a shift to individual land holding byproviding markets for agricultural produce and cash crops. This wealth madeproductive land even dearer as senior men turned away tenants and juniorrelatives. As farmland grew scarce, social tensions in Kiambu inevitablyincreased, and district officers noted a rise in ‘inter-family squabbles’ born ofa pernicious individualism.

Consequently many Kikuyu, Kiambu people in particular, had to eitherbecome squatters on settler estates or seek their fortunes in less crowdedreserves. This slow and not entirely visible population shift began before theFirst World War and increased in the interwar decades. By the early s,,Kikuyu were living outside their home reserves. Far from secure intheir privileged position in the highlands, the settlers fretted constantly aboutthe risks of living precariously amongst a sea of Kikuyu squatters.The long term viability of the white highland thus meant resettling these

surplus people in more sparsely inhabited reserves. Yet the Native LandsTrust Ordinance (NLTO) stood in the way. Seeking to circumvent this legalimpediment, in the metropolitan government appointed the KenyaLand Commission (KLC) to re-examine the terms of the NLTO and definethe regions where Europeans had exclusive land rights. Not surprisingly, thecommissioners found that the Kikuyu reserves were of adequate size andendorsed the settler community’s land claims. While the commissionersacknowledged that some of the Kiambu people who would have to be moved(thereby joining the ranks of the landless) to create more rational boundariesfor the white highlands had legal claim to their land, they advised the imperial

The National Archives of Great Britain, London (TNA) CO ///a/,Hilton Young, Chair Commission on Closer Union, to Colonial Secretary, June ;W.M. Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of theSahara (London, ), .

Hailey, An African Survey, ; Great Britain, Kenya Land Commission, Report ofthe Kenya Land Commission (London, ), .

C. Maher, Soil Erosion and Land Utilization in the Embu Reserve, I (Nairobi, ),.

G.N. Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an AfricanPetite Bourgeoisie (New Haven, CT, ), –, ; G. C. Kershaw, Mau Mau fromBelow (Oxford, ), –; C. C. Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men,and Trade in the Nairobi Area, – (Bloomington, IN, ), –.

TNACO /, Kenya Colony and Protectorate, The Problem of the Squatter, Mar. .

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authorities to pay compensation to the entire Kikuyu community throughthe office of tribal chiefs instead of to displaced individuals on the groundsthat reserve land was collective property. The KLC’s report also provided thelegal basis for the colonial government to formally delineate the racialboundaries of the highlands through a revised and more flexible NLTO,which empowered district officers to evict Africans trespassing in foreignreserves.

This was easier said than done, for the humanitarian rhetoric of colonialtribalism made it extremely difficult to tinker with the native reserve system.Depicting Africans as tribesmen legitimized British rule, but it also obligatedthe authorities to act as trustees for supposedly fragile tribal communities.Some district officers took these obligations quite seriously during theheyday of indirect rule. For H. E. Lambert, the tribe was almost an organicinstitution in its own right and needed protection from the destructive forcesof Christianity and western culture. Arguing that the ‘conservation of the soulof an African tribe is as essential as the conservation of its soil’, he rebuttedmissionary criticism that tribal culture was immoral. ‘Individualism’, whichLambert compared to ‘sheet erosion’, was the greatest threat to the collective‘tribal soul’. Pushing the analogy further, he viewed a cash economy, taxation,and Christian conversion as detribalizing corrosive forces that ‘[dug] deep and[left] scars on the body politic of the tribe’.

On paper, the KLC’s rules appeared to strengthen the inherent tribalismof the native reserve system, but in reality even the commissioners had toacknowledge that the government’s rigid ethnic geography was unworkable.Humanitarian interests in Britain agreed with Lambert that the tribal soul inEast Africa needed state protection and were therefore unwilling to acceptdrastic changes to Kenya’s tribal geography. The KLC criticized theoriginal NLTO’s tribal boundaries as too inflexible to allow for ‘peacefulinterpenetration’ between the reserves, but these political realities forced it toacknowledge the rights of ‘occupant tribes’ by making interpenetrationcontingent upon the consent of host communities. If this could be achieved,the Kikuyu problem would disappear because their surplus population wouldassimilate into tribes with less congested reserves.Yet the KLC failed to spell out how this feat of tribal engineering might be

accomplished. While agricultural specialists like Colin Maher agreed that ‘themost beneficial line of development of the Kikuyu tribe is likely to be by theintermingling in marriage of the various peoples and by inter-settlement andthe sinking of local differences’, district officers like Lambert, who fanciedthemselves experts in native custom, were more concerned with protecting

Kenya Land Commission,Report of the Kenya Land Commission, ; Hailey,NativeAdministration, –; Lambert, ‘Systems of Land Tenure’, ; Colony and Protectorate ofKenya, Native Lands Trust Ordinance (Chapter ) (Nairobi: Government Printer,).

KNA DC MRU /; H. E. Lambert, ‘Disintegration and reintegration in the Merutribe’, unpublished manuscript, Jan. , –, –.

Kenya Land Commission, Report, ; Great Britain, Kenya Land CommissionReport: Summary of Conclusions Reached by His Majesty’s Government (London, ),–.

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tribal culture. Moreover, they worried that unregulated movementthroughout the reserves would create administrative chaos by promotingindividualism and accelerating detribalization. Administrators thereforesought to protect the viability of the tribally-based reserve system byestablishing that migrants would be adopted into new tribes. Thinkingoptimistically, they made ‘artificial (ritual) birth’ the ‘necessary condition ofany stable inter-penetration’. Those who successfully completed theserituals to the extent that host communities accepted them were legalinterpenetrators, while those who refused and provoked a local backlashwere ‘infiltrators’ who remained subject to expulsion under NLTO.While thousands, if not tens of thousands, of landless people accepted some

form of assimilation as the condition for settlement in a new reserve, colonialauthorities were deluding themselves. First, many Kikuyu, particularly thosefrom the most radical segments of Kiambu society, defiantly refusedadoption. Bowing to tribal authority, particularly in regards to land use,restricted opportunities for commercial agriculture and entailed a loss ofproperty and possible exploitation by foreign chiefs. Equally significant, itwas personally demeaning, and in Senior Chief Koinange told theFort Hall LNC that Kiambu people rejected the administration’s doctrine of‘blood brotherhood’ because they ‘did not wish to lose their identity thisway’. And the Meru LNC’s complaints about ungovernable Kikuyuinfiltrators demonstrated that other communities were not always ready towelcome migrants with open arms.Far from solving the squatter problem, the KLC failed to realize the

government would have to relocate roughly , people to achieve itsmain goal of making the European sections of the highlands uniformly white.Nevertheless, district officers began the eviction process even though therewas nowhere to put the displaced population. Facing settler harassment andprosecution for trespassing if they remained, many Kiambu people set off ontheir own to find unused land in both nearby and distant reserves. The MasaiExtra-Provincial District, which covered over , square miles of invitingagricultural and grazing land but held less than , people, was the mostobvious destination. When pro-Maasai district officers tried to send theinterlopers back to the Kikuyu reserves their counterparts in Kiambutouched off a bitter inter-administrative squabble by refusing to accept theevicted infiltrators on the grounds that the Kikuyu reserves were alreadyfilled to capacity. Additionally, the Kisii reserve in western Kenya’sSouthern Kavirondo District attracted significant numbers of displaced

C. Maher, Soil Erosion II, . KNA OPE //, Chief Native Commissioner (CNC) to Chief Secretary, Apr.

; Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Kikuyu Lands, . Quoted in R.M. Breen, ‘The politics of land: the Kenya Land Commission

(–) and its effects on land policy in Kenya’ (unpublished PhD thesis, MichiganState University, ), ; Maher, Soil Erosion, I, –.

KNA DC NGONG //, Officer-in-Charge Masai EPD to PC Central Province, Oct. ; KNA DC NGONG //, Memorandum by DC Kiambu, LandlessKikuyu, Oct. ; TNACO //, Report by E. A. Sweatman, Nov. ; For theauthoritative account of Kikuyu ‘interpenetration’ in the Maasai reserve, see R. Waller,‘Acceptees and aliens: Kikuyu settlement in Maasailand’, in Being Maasai.

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Kiambu people. And to further complicate matters, district officers also hadto take action against illegal settlements of Luhya, Kalenjin, Kamba, and Luopeoples in foreign reserves as the decade drew to a close.

TH E D I F F E R ENT WAY S TO B E K I KUYU I N M E RU

The close cultural ties between the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru peoples madethe much closer and less crowded non-Kikuyu reserves comprising theKikuyu Land Unit logical destinations for ambitious or desperate Kikuyumigrants. Its debatable ethnic spaces provided useful openings for mobilehighland peoples to fit themselves into local communities. While theauthorities tried to rationalize the reserve system by imagining that tribesmenhad exclusive and bounded identities, many migrants saw no contradiction ininvoking multiple identities that blurred tribal boundaries. This explainshow Kakuthi wa Ithogora and Karigi wa Kubutha could tell the KLC: ‘I aman Embu and also a Kikuyu’, andKombo waMunyiri could similarly declare:‘I belong to the Mbere tribe, i.e. the Mbere section of the Kikuyu tribe.’

In Meru, the first people who explicitly identified themselves as Kikuyu inthe colonial sense apparently arrived as mission teachers during the FirstWorld War. Nicknamed kamuchunku (‘little whites’) by their would-be flock,they won few converts and relied on Meru chiefs for protection. The firstKikuyu settlers turned up in the s, and most appear to have beenaccepted as temporary tenants or adopted Embu and Meru. According toJeffrey Fadiman’s informants, in pre-conquest times the latter process wouldhave entailed mingling blood with the adoptees empowering their patrons byassuming the explicit role of social juniors. A small group of newcomers,many of whom were literate Kikuyu who had acquired a substantial amountof cash through the colonial economy, refused to play this role and insteadbought land from Meru elders. District officers deemed this illegal undernative law, but the new Kikuyu landowners avoided eviction by posing asMeru clients. Meru elders had more success in slowing the sales by refusing torecognize the migrants’ land claims. With no security of tenure, land was amuch riskier investment.

As in the rest of Kenya, the status of migrants in Embu and Meru becamemore controversial in the s. While there was a general surplus of land inboth reserves that lasted into the s, population growth and thegovernment’s promotion of coffee and cotton production during thedepression made both communities less willing to allow outsiders to claimprime agricultural land. The details are hard to come by, but it appears that

KNAOPE //, Native Intelligence Safari Report, Sept. ; KNAOPE //, PC Nyanza Province to Chief Secretary, Oct. ; Rhodes House, Bodleian LibraryOxford (RH) MS Africa. s. , Embu Handing Over Report, by I. R. Gillespie, .

Kenya Land Commission, Evidence and Memoranda, Volume I (London, ),–.

Fadiman, When We Began, , –, ; Lambert, ‘Systems of land tenure’, ;KNA DC MRU ///, Memorandum of Baraza at Chuka, June .

C. Maher, Preliminary Notes on Land Utilisation and Soil Erosion in the Meru Reserve(Nairobi, ), , ; B.M.K.Mbae, ‘The history of the coffee industry inMeru, –’ (University of Nairobi History Department Student Research Seminar Paper, Sept. ), –; Bernard, East of Mount Kenya, .

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the mass evictions from Kiambu District spurred increased migrationwestward, with the displaced Kikuyu settling first in Chuka on theEmbu –Meru border and then moving northward to farm on the still openforest margins. Embu District annual reports made little mention of themuntil when district officers suddenly noticed that Kikuyu settlement inthe reserve had jumped to , people (an per cent increase). Fadiman’sinformants termed these highly entrepreneurial settlers ‘tree eaters’, and theiractivities led Lambert to worry that the breakdown in tribal sanctions againstfelling communally owned trees would destroy the forests on MountKenya.

Maher’s report on land use in the Meru reserve included picturesof farmers from a new mixed Meru/Kikuyu settlement cutting trees andcultivating steep slopes on the forest border at a place called Punishment Hill.Noting that the region had been an unsafe border zone in pre-conquest times,he perceptively made the connection between its settlement and the events inKiambu: ‘The people whom I saw had the somewhat sulky and suspiciousdemeanor of natives who are not certain of their rights to their land, or whoexpect their rights to be challenged, an expression, in fact, similar to that withwhich one is familiar amongst natives in the Kiambu Reserve.’

The situation at Punishment Hill was far from unique, and Maheruncovered similar Kikuyu settlements in the Embu reserve. His brief surveyof the inhabitants at Njukini found that many were former squatters orplantation workers from Kiambu. The most prosperous farmers employedlocal people as laborers even though they claimed to be junior members ofEmbu clans. As part of the agricultural department rather than the fieldadministration, Maher was more concerned with soil conservation than tribaltrespassing. He therefore approvingly noted that many of the migrants used‘progressive’ farming methods. The agricultural officer was particularlyimpressed with an eighty-acre farm near Embu town where a self-describedKikuyu adoptee grew corn, onions, and wheat and sold an ample bean cropthrough the Kenya Farmer’s Association. The man’s family was well fed andlived in a large square house, and ‘as befitted a yeoman of substance, thisKikuyu was polite and well dressed while his feet were shod in gum boots’.

These were just the kind of industrious farmers that could have generatedexport revenues for the government during the depression. But commercialagriculture was barely feasible in tribally-organized reserves where theimperial regime assumed that land was collective property. While acknowl-edging that Kikuyu farmers brought innovative agricultural methods to theirEmbu and Meru neighbors and patrons, Maher worried that ‘Kikuyu ideas’about private land tenure and intensive agriculture would promote ecologi-cally damaging farming practices. But he also conceded that the displacedKikuyu would have more incentive to invest in sustainable agriculture if theyhad secure title to their land.Maher’s main concern was that the most commercially-oriented Kikuyu

farmers, who probably represented a relatively small segment of the migrant

Maher, Soil Erosion, I, . Fadiman, When We Began, –; Lambert, ‘Systems of land tenure’, . Maher, Preliminary Notes, –. Maher, Soil Erosion, I, –, , .

BE ING KIKUYU IN MERU

community, were unfairly appropriating the agricultural patrimony of othertribes by skimming off ‘the cream of the fertility of the soil’ in a quest forquick profits. Tellingly, he noted that the people who became adoptedMeru or Embu rarely behaved so selfishly. This most likely explains whysome displaced Kikuyu defiantly insisted on remaining Kikuyu even if itentailed the risk of expulsion and prosecution for tribal trespassing.

Deferring to tribal chiefs and elders would have placed too many restrictionson how they used and profited from the land. Moreover, it appears that a fewof the more commercially ambitious migrants actually retained some land inthe Kiambu reserve.

There is no way to know precisely how many displaced Kikuyubecame respectable Meru or Embu for in most cases the Kenyan authoritiesonly noticed migrants who openly, if not recklessly, refused adoption. Thisgenerally occurred when chiefs and elders, who often played a doublegame by taking money from the new arrivals, complained abouttrespassing foreigners who rejected tribal authority by cutting down trees,plowing up communal land, and founding local branches of the KikuyuCentral Association (KCA) and the Kikuyu Independent SchoolsAssociation (KISA). While most highland communities shared the generalpolitical goals of the KCA and agreed that Africans should have schoolsfree of mission control, many people in the Embu and Meru reservesworried that these explicitly Kikuyu associations had their own colonizingagendas.In the late s, officials took action against the most obvious trespassers

who openly declared their Kikuyuness. Invoking first the Native AuthorityOrdinance and then the revised NLTO, they directed accused infiltrators tocease farming and return to the Kikuyu reserves. Mwangi wa Ngurigareceived such a quit order in on that grounds that he had violated Merucustom by stealing sheep, using a plow, and refusing adoption into a Meruclan. Gradually recognizing the scope of Kikuyu movement into thewestern highland reserves, district officers undertook a systematic survey ofthe migrants in a vain attempt to determine who was a legitimateinterpenetrator and who was an expellable infiltrator.

Two years later, Meru officials ambitiously tried to evict an entire Kikuyusettlement at Chuka. As previously noted, the Chuka were a highland‘subgroup’ that the colonial regime counted as Meru for administrativepurposes. Led by a trader and farmer named Mukua Kagembe(‘Muruakagembe’ to the authorities), this industrious Kikuyu community ofsome thirty families drew the ire of the Chuka chiefs by clearing forested land,monopolizing springs in public grazing areas, starting KISA schools, andchallenging local authority by granting cultivation rights to new Kikuyu

Maher, Soil Erosion, II, . Maher, Soil Erosion, I, –. KNA DC MRU ///, DC Kiambu to Shamsud-Deen, Member of Legislative

Council (MLC), Dec. . KNA OPE ///, Order Under Section () of the Native Authority

Ordinance, . KNA DC MRU ///, DC Meru to PC Central Province, Sept. .

TIMOTHY PARSONS

immigrants. Sitting in council, Chuka elders charged Mukua with bribingchiefs by plowing their fields and using witchcraft to intimidate potentialcritics. They also complained that the Kikuyu behaved like ‘Europeanfarmers –making money from their shambas and sending it out of thedistrict’. Mukua and his people expressed surprise at the charges andclaimed that they had never given their hosts any problems, while anothermember of the settlement, Thagana Chege, also asserted his right to settle inMeru because the government had taken his land in Kiambu.

The migrants won temporary protection from Chuka and governmentreprisals by convincing the Indian councilor Shamsud Deen, who oftendefended African interests on the Kenya Legislative Council, to take up theircase. Specifically invoking the NLTO, Shamsud Deen reminded the imperialadministration that it could only expel an infiltrator if the governor couldaffirm that ‘sufficient land for the accommodation of the African and hisfamily [was] available’. The councilor further pointed out that the NLTOalso blocked expulsions until farmers harvested their crops, and he added areligious dimension to the controversy by maintaining that the Chuka Kikuyucould not undergo a ‘pagan’ adoption ceremony because they were Christians.Similarly, Harry Thuku, whose Kikuyu Provincial Association was lessradical than the KCA, tried to mediate the dispute by promising that hewould answer for Mukua’s people if the government allowed them to stayunder the authority of a separate Kikuyu chief. Somewhat contradictorily,Thuku’s Vice-President Hezekiah Mundia further claimed that Kikuyu andMeru (Chuka) chiefs had met in and declared that both communitiesbelonged to the same tribe.

These interventions bought the Chuka Kikuyu some time, but in early the government sent them back to Kiambu on the grounds that they hadignored a legal eviction notice. Meru administrators told Shamsud Deen thatthe community were subversive followers of a banned Kikuyu religioussect known as the Watu wa Mungu (‘people of God’), and they allegedthat Chuka leaders had complained that Mukua’s KISA school ‘appearedto be trying to turn young men against Government’. The Meru districtcommissioner also warned his counterpart in Kiambu to pay no attention tothe evictees’ claims of destitution because they left Chuka with oxcarts full offood and a great many goats.

KNA DC MRU ///a, Report by DC Meru, Apr. . KNA DC MRU ///, Memorandum of Baraza at Chuka, June ; KNA

DC MRU ///, Legasi son of Mukua Kagembe, Dec. . KNA DC MRU ///a, Shamsud Deen, MLC to CNC, Sept. ; KNA

DC MRU ///, Hezekiah Mundia to PC Central Province, Nov. ; KNA DCMRU ///, Harry Thuku to DC Meru, Apr. ; KNA DC MRU //,Unasked Legislative Council Question No. , June .

KNADCMRU ///a, Report by DCMeru, Apr. ; KNADCMRU ///, PC Central Province to Chief Secretary, Sept. ; KNA DC MRU ///, DC Meru to DC Kiambu, Jan. ; KNA DC MRU ///, DC Meru to PCCentral Province, Feb. ; KNADCMRU ///, PC Central Province to ChiefSecretary, March ; KNA DC MRU ///, DC Meru to Harry Thuku, May.

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While the Chuka case is unusual in that Mukua was particularly successfulin attracting influential patrons, variations on this drama took placethroughout the Meru reserve in and the first half of . Furthernorth on the boundary of the Ngala forest in Igembe,Meru elders dealt with asimilarly intransigent Kikuyu enclave by taking it upon themselves to harvestthe millet crop the ‘tree-eaters’ had secretly planted in an attempt to use theNLTO rules to delay their expulsion. By reconfiguring the Njuri Nceke(a pre-conquest council of elders that mediated social disputes) into a quasi-administrative body, Lambert and his colleagues gave cooperative Meruelders the legal means to check Kikuyu expansion by ruling that land sales tounassimilated outsiders violated Meru custom.

These successful evictions might have created the impression that colonialauthorities and their chiefly allies had solved the problem of Kikuyuinfiltration. However, the expulsion of defiantly unassimilated people likeMukua Kagembe and his followers took place against the backdrop ofthe imperial regime’s failing efforts to resolve the larger problem ofdisplaced Kikuyu. Legal wrangling over mass expulsions in the Kiambuheartland delayed implementation of the KLC’s recommendations, andin government efforts to evict large numbers of Kikuyu from newlydeclared European zones ground to halt as the Colonial Office realized thatmass deportations were politically indefensible in light of the Nazi atrocitiesin Europe. Indeed, the KCA cleverly highlighted these similarities in a floodof letters and petitions. Moreover, it still made little sense to continuethe ‘whitening’ of Kiambu District when there was no politically acceptableplace to put the surplus people, particularly when tribalistic districtofficers in the Masai Extra-Provincial District continued to expel Kikuyuinfiltrators.Meeting in , administrators therefore set out to turn the abstract

doctrine of tribal interpenetration into a workable set of policy guidelines.Their resolve quickly dissipated as the government became distracted withpressing wartime matters. Consequently, the steady movement of peoplefrom Kiambu to the Meru and Embu reserves continued largely unabated.

In March , administrators in Embu District arrested Gitau wa Nyumbu,one of the original Chuka Kikuyu, on his way back to Meru, and Merucommunity leaders were soon complaining that most of the unassimilatedmigrants whom they expelled just a few months earlier had returned. Thecivil authorities did not pay much attention, but military recruiters in thedistrict uncovered cases of Kikuyu infiltrators, who sought the superior payand benefits that came with service in combat units, falsely listing themselves

Fadiman, When We Began, –; Lambert, ‘Systems of land tenure’, . Lambertalso used the reconfigured Njuri Ncheke to discipline disruptive ‘women’s cults’, seeL. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley,), –.

TNA CO /, , B Kimengi wa Muchema and Marius Karat to ColonialSecretary, Mar. .

KNAOPE //, Governor Sir HenryMoore to CNC, Sept. ; KNAOPE//, Officer-in-Charge Masai EPD to Chief Secretary, Aug. .

KNA DC MRU ///, DC Embu to PC Central Province, Mar. .

TIMOTHY PARSONS

as ‘Meru’ to fit within the East Africa Command’s mandated tribal recruitingquotas.

By the close of the war, the problem of unassimilated Kikuyu once againbecame too pronounced to ignore. As in the late s, Meru elders led thecall for mass evictions. Adoptable and compliant clients were acceptable, butaggressively entrepreneurial individualists were another matter. The elders’specific complaints against the trespassers included illegal beer brewing,shirking communal (tribal) labor obligations, and refusing to follow thecolonial government’s new soil conservation rules. Conversely, it also appearsthat several of the more opportunistic chiefs and LNC members may havesecretly taken payments from the Kikuyu migrants. Therefore, Machariawa Maina and Gachengiri wa Matu, who received quit notices in late ,may have been telling the truth when they claimed that Chief M’Imathio,who was conveniently dead, had given them permission to farm in the reserve.Demonstrating a working knowledge of the NLTO, they also asked for timeto harvest their crops.

By this time, news that there was open land in the Meru reserve hadbegun to attract land-hungry people from all over East Africa. The diverse listof evictees included Raja bin Ramathan (formerly Kirya Katuessia), who wasapparently a Chagga (and thus a Tanganyikan) convert to Islam. The detailsare sketchy, but he appears to have tried and failed to use marriage to aMeru woman, instead of formal adoption into a Meru clan, as his claim topermanent residence in the reserve. Conversely, hundreds of Kiamburefugees similarly found refuge in Tanganyika as forest squatters and farmlaborers.

This ongoing and technically illegal cross-reserve and cross-bordermigration demonstrates that there was very little that the imperial regimecould do to limit African mobility. The Tanganyikan authorities actuallytolerated some trespassing from Kenya because they faced a labor shortagein the post-Second World War era. But this was not the solution to thepernicious overcrowding problem in the three Kikuyu reserves. In fact,the wartime economic boom made the situation worse by giving thesettlers the resources to mechanize their farms, thereby dispensing withthe need for Kikuyu labor. Consequently, district councils in the whitehighlands enacted restrictive regulations that cut the remaining squatterpopulation from , to , between and . To makematters worse, the rising profitability of commercial farming in the Kikuyureserves as a result of the war gave rich Kikuyu even greater resources to evicttenants and dispossess small landholders.

Recognizing that it was imperative to find a way to fold these surpluspeople into other tribes, the governor directed field administrators to draft a

KNA MAA////, EA Military Records to Officer Commanding st GroupEAMLS, Oct. .

KNA PC CP ///, DC Meru to PC Central Province, Mar. . KNA PC CP ///a, Macharia wa Maina & Gachengiri wa Matu to PC Central

Province, Feb. ; KNA PC CP ///, DCMeru to PC Central Province, Mar..

KNA VQ //a, Chief Secretary Tanganyika to Chief Secretary Kenya, Sept.; KNA PC CP ///a, DC Meru to PC Central Province, Nov. .

Hailey, Native Administration, ; Peterson, Creative Writing, .

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workable interpenetration policy. The actual assignment fell to H. E.Lambert, the former Meru district commissioner who had now adopted afar more pragmatic view of tribal culture. Taking the KLC report andNLTO as his starting point, Lambert defined infiltration as ‘settlementamong a different people but retention by the infiltrator of his originaltribality [to coin a word on the analogy of ‘nationality’]’. Conversely,legitimate interpenetration was ‘settlement involving a change of tribe on thepart of the interpenetrator, who becomes a member of the tribe of the peopleamong whom he settles, and relinquishes rights that into which he wasborn’.

Having become less worried about the fate of the ‘tribal soul’, Lamberttook his colleagues in the field administration to task for becoming tribalpartisans and placing too many obstacles in the way of legal interpenetration.He therefore proposed to make harvesting a single crop without incurringobjections from the host community the sole criteria for distinguishingbetween an illegal infiltrator and an acceptable interpenetrator. Protests by‘nativist’ district commissioners that this would reward trespassers whomanaged to remain undetected for a single year forced Lambert to expand theprobationary period to two years and three crops of uncontroversial residencein a foreign reserve as the criteria for legal settlement. The governmentspelled out these new interpenetration rules in a pair of administrativecirculars that went to every district in the colony. The circulars furtherdefined an expellable infiltrator as a person who committed an offense againstlocal custom by refusing to take part in an adoption ceremony, formingseparate native associations, demanding higher bride prices, bringing in moreunauthorized immigrants, or violating local conservation laws. InLambert’s eyes, tribal identity meant little more than acceptance of chieflyauthority and the enforced communalism of the reserve system.The new guidelines seemed clear on paper, but Lambert’s more precise but

flexible interpenetration regulations did virtually nothing to make assimila-tion more appealing. In fact, the rate of illegal migration between the reservesactually increased after the war with members of the Luo, Logoli, Kamba,and Kipsigis communities joining the ranks of the illegal infiltrators. Evenmore troubling, it appears that a much larger percentage of Kikuyu migrantsopenly and militantly refused to undergo ritual adoption. This was the case inthe Gusii highlands in Nyanza Province where a small enclave of angrydisplaced Kiambu people flouted the interpenetration rules by demandingKISA schools, Kikuyu representatives on the LNC, and freedom to engage inunrestricted trading and commercial agriculture.

KNA OPE //, Memorandum by H. E. Lambert on Draft Rules Under theNative Lands Trust Ordinance, Jan. ; KNA OPE //, Secretariat Circular,Interpenetration and Infiltration in Native Land Units, May .

KNAOPE //, Officer-in-ChargeMasai EPD to Chief Secretary, Oct. ;KNA OPE //, Secretariat Circular, Statement of Government Interim Policy withRegard to Interpenetration and Infiltration in Native Land Units, Aug. ; KNAOPE //, Secretariat Circular, Interpenetration and Infiltration on Native LandUnits, July .

See T. Parsons, ‘Local responses to the ethnic geography of colonialism in the Gusiihighlands of British-ruled Kenya’, Ethnohistory, : () –.

TIMOTHY PARSONS

The situation was much the same in the Embu and Meru reserves wherethe radicalization of a large segment of the Kikuyu community made migrantsfar less willing to undergo the expense and potential humiliation of adoption.The Embu LNC still considered most Kikuyu migrants reasonable andacceptable, but the councilors complained about a militant faction led byKiore wa Kinyanjui (reportedly the son of an influential former chief) whocommitted offenses against Embu custom by running a commercial busservice to Nairobi, vandalizing a salt lick, closing off communal grazing land,and insulting local elders. Other infiltrators demanded Kikuyu representationon the LNC, attacked tribal policemen, and held ‘immoral European typedances’. Threatened with eviction by district officers under the interpene-tration regulations, Kiore and his followers convinced Eliud Mathu, the soleAfrican representative on the Legislative Council, to intervene on theirbehalf.

To the west, similar dramas played out in the Meru reserve. After morethan a decade of struggling with defiant Kikuyu infiltrators, frustratedMeru chiefs and councilors once again pushed the Kenyan authorities todeal conclusively with the problem. The district commissioner began evictionproceedings in May , but problems arose when he tried to send themback to Kiambu. Recognizing that it had become politically explosive toforcibly return people to the crowded and tense Kikuyu reserves, the CentralProvince provincial commissioner refused to sign eviction notices for the firsttwenty families and instead pressed the Meru authorities to make theinterpenetration process work.

When news of the events in Meru reached the Kiambu LNC, the Kikuyucouncilors responded with the inflammatory statements about Kikuyusettlement rights in Meru that provoked testy exchanges with their Merucounterparts. This included the debate over the difference between adoptedMeru muchiarwa and murombi strangers that opened this article. In additionto asserting there were significant differences between Meru and Kikuyu, theMeru councilors declared that displaced Kikuyu should seek compensationfor lost land in Europe, not in theMeru reserve. In early , they broughtthe controversy to a head by presenting the authorities with a list of ,people who refused to be adopted. The Meru district commissionersubsequently gave all non-Meru migrants in the district three months tofind sponsors or face eviction.

These events coincided with similar prosecutions of illegal settlers inthe Maasai and Gusii reserves. Acting on reports of hut burnings, cropconfiscations, and mass arrests, Eliud Mathu tried to mediate betweenthe accused infiltrators and their hosts. He also offered a resolution in the

KNA PC CP ///, DC Embu to PC Central Province, Aug. ; KNA PCCP ///, DC Embu to PC Central Province, Dec. ; KNA PC CP ///,DC Embu to PC Central Province, Apr. .

KNA PC CP ///a , E.W. Mathu to CNC, Sept. . KNA PC CP ///, DC Meru to PC Central Province, May ; KNA PC

CP ///; PC Central Province to DC Meru, June . KNA PC CP ///, Kiambu LNC Minutes, Nov. ; KNA PC CP ///

a, DC Meru to PC Central Province, Dec. . KNA OPE ///, DC Meru to PC Central Province, Apr. ; KNA PC

CP ///g, Testimony vs. Stephen Karariga, Sept. .

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Legislative Council that called on the government to create districtinterpenetration committees to promote adoption and give migrants moretime to adapt to their host communities. Similarly, the Kiambu authoritiessought to defuse the tensions by convening a joint session of theMeru, Embu,Kiambu, Nyeri, and Fort Hall LNCs. The chief native commissionerspoke in support of Mathu’s resolution in the Legislative Council andaffirmed that the government sought ‘maximum fluidity with security’, buthe also reminded Mathu that most of the migration problems stemmed frominfiltrators who refused to undergo adoption.

It is hardly surprising that the government’s overly ambitious interpene-tration policies proved unworkable given that they rested on the assumptionthat all Africans were undifferentiated tribesmen. The notions of tribalcollectivity embedded in the native reserve system, the KLC report, and theNLTOmade no provision for private land tenure, commercial agriculture, orfree enterprise. It was understandable that ambitious or politically-inclinedpeople would view tribal adoption as an attempt to curtail, if not entirelysuppress, their individual rights, particularly for those angry over the loss oftheir land in Kiambu.Interpenetration was thus an unrealistic solution to an intractable problem,

and it was only a matter of time before Kenya’s discriminatory ethnicgeography led to violence. Forced to scratch out an existence in theovercrowded Kikuyu heartland, unwelcoming foreign reserves, restrictivesettler farms, or the Nairobi slums, a generation of desperate young Kikuyuconcluded that they had nothing to lose in taking up arms. The Britishlabeled the insurrection that engulfed central Kenya in the first half of thes the Mau Mau Emergency, but the rebels referred to themselves as theKenya Land Freedom Army. In attacking the Kikuyu chiefs, missionconverts, and other prosperous members of their own community in additionto the privileged settler class, they mounted an armed challenge to the nativereserve system.At first, the draconian measures that the Kenya government used to defeat

the guerillas appeared to finally resolve the infiltration problem. Empoweredto act summarily under the terms of a State of Emergency (martial law), thesecurity forces evicted and incarcerated defiant members of Kikuyu enclavesin Tanganyika, the Gusii highlands, the Masai Extra-Provincial District, andthe Meru and Embu reserves. In , they similarly rounded up most ofthe Kikuyu in Nairobi during Operation Anvil. Eventually, almost the entireKikuyu population of Kenya was either in detention or under closesupervision in fortified strategic villages. Yet it is also likely that manyformer Kikuyu escaped the dragnet by virtue of their adoption into othertribes. Against the backdrop of the violence and civil chaos of the Mau Mauwar, accepting junior status under the interpenetration rules finally seemed a

KNA PC CP ///, DC Kiambu to PC Central Province, Oct. ; KenyaColony and Protectorate, Legislative Council Debates Official Report, vol. , th session, Nov. – Jan. (Nairobi, ).

KNA PC CP ///, DC Embu to PC Central Province, Jan. ; KNADP//, DC South Nyanza to DC Kiambu, Mar. .

Bernard, East of Mount Kenya, ; Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, ;D. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire(New York, ), , .

TIMOTHY PARSONS

reasonable trade-off for protection from the security forces and their KikuyuHome Guard proxies.Furthermore, although a great many young people from non-Kikuyu

highland communities joined or sympathized with the Mau Mau fighters,imperial repression created strong incentives for Meru and Embu leaders toagain affirm that they were not members of a ‘Kikuyu sub-tribe’. Panickedby their inability to ascertain friend from foe during the revolt, the imperialregime and the settler community viewed all Kikuyu as tainted. In , thedistrict commission for Nairobi deemed only per cent of the Kikuyupopulation ‘reliable’.

By extension this made all residents of the highlands suspect by virtue oftheir Kikuyu-like cultural institutions, which explains why Meru and Embupoliticians went to great lengths to distance their communities from theirKikuyu cousins. Paradoxically, it took the Emergency to give the tribalfiction of the native reserve system a measure of reality by making the reservesmore coherent tribal units. In , the authorities split off the Meru reservefrom the greater Kikuyu Land Unit, and the mass incarceration of Kikuyususpects without trial gave the region a temporary and artificial appearanceof homogeneity. Equally ironic, the government’s attempt to create asympathetic class of yeoman farmers through the land consolidation schemeslaid out in the Swynnerton plan went a long way to legitimizing theindividualistic conception of Kikuyuness that made earlier generations ofinfiltrators so vulnerable and inassimilable.

CONCLU S I O N

These realities of ethnic interpenetration and infiltration in the Meru andEmbu reserves during the imperial era offer a fine-grained perspective onthe origins and nature of tribal identity in the twentieth century. There wasno single coherent Meru community before the British conquest of thehighlands, but there were a series of groups that shared enough linguistic andcultural institutions to allow imperial administrators to group them togetheras ‘Meru’. Yet these shared markers of identity were also sufficiently flexibleto absorb Kikuyu migrants and other outsiders. Similarly, one of the mainreasons that the Meru council of elders (the Njuri Ncheke) was so effective inlimiting Kikuyu attempts to claim land on an individual basis was that it hadstrong precolonial precedents. But this reworked body was a product of thecolonial era in that Lambert and the other nativist district commissionerscreated new initiation rituals that were compatible with Christianity and gave

Northwestern University Library, Solomon Mwirichia, ‘Mau Mau in Meru’,unpublished manuscript, c. ; Interview with Kiraithe Nyaga, Nairobi, Jul. .

KNA OPE ///, A. C. Small, Nairobi Extra-Provincial District HandingOver Report.

Kenya Colony and Protectorate, Legislative Council Debates Official Report, vol. ,part , nd session, Apr. – June , ‘The Native Lands Trust (Amendment) Bill’(Nairobi, ); D. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency,Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge, ), –.

Thomas, Politics of the Womb, –. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, A Plan to Intensify the Development of Agriculture

in Kenya (Nairobi, ).

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the council new and unprecedented authority to enforce decisions withfines and other coercive measures. Lambert’s interpenetration rules workedthe same way in invoking pre-conquest systems of adoption and ‘bloodbrotherhood’ as precedents for creating new social and political categories.The diverse meanings of being a Kikuyu in Meru fit neither strict

primordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. Aswith all people, Britain’s Kenyan subjects had a variety of options in decidinghow to identify themselves and could assume different political and socialroles by invoking one or more of them at a time and in specific circumstances.As Floya Anthias suggests in her theoretical discussion of collective identityand translocational positionality, the question is not ‘who are you?’ but ‘whatand how have you’ becomewho you are?The native reserve system’s linkageof tribal identity with land rights created powerful incentives for landless ormarginal people to accept adoption into a new tribe. Some probably took thisnaturalization process as seriously as Lambert intended. For others, like themilitant Kikuyu enclaves that insisted on defiantly remaining Kikuyu, foreigntribal identities were an unacceptable infringement on their commercialaspirations and rights as individuals. The colonial attempt to link identitywith tribal space through the native reserves simply set the scene for ethnicidentity formation. By framing political and social discourse in tribal terms,colonial authorities forced Africans to speak in tribal terms. They could not,however, dictate what these terms meant, nor could they dictate the nature ordirection of the conversation. And we should not underestimate the capacityof defiant individuals to act out in anger when confronted with authoritarianlimits on their personal freedom. Ultimately, ordinary people had moreinfluence than H. E. Lambert and other nativist administrators in decidingwhat it meant to be Kikuyu, Embu, or Meru.

Fadiman, When We Began, –. Anthias, ‘Where Do I Belong?’, .

TIMOTHY PARSONS